Red Garland Trio — Groovy (2024 OJC remaster)
Qobuz reissue review (April 2024)
Kicking off a jazz album with a take on Duke Ellington’s stomping “C-Jam Blues” gives the listener some sense of where Red Garland was pointing his trio on this monster album. Groovy is absolutely not constructed to be a gentle, pensive piano trio record, in which the melodies are subtly complemented by a whispery background rhythm section. As the electrified energy of “C-Jam Blues” makes clear, this is an album optimized for energy. This trio — Garland, Art Taylor, and Paul Chambers — committed a big batch of material to tape throughout 1956 and 1957, and Groovy was the third and final Prestige LP of those cuts to be released in 1957. (Prestige founder Bob Weinstock was never one to let a booked recording session go to waste.) While it was the last to come out, Groovy was probably the most impressive of the three. From the breathless run through the opener, the rest of the brisk set (all standards except for the Garland-penned “Hey Now”) swings hard, fast, and even a little “groovy” at times. “Will You Still Be Mine?” — not a number renowned for its gentility — is played especially intensely, giving nearly as much opportunity for the rhythm players to go hard as it gives Garland to show off his dazzling, bouncy piano style. Sure, there’s a brief slow down for a bluesy — and still vaguely gritty — take on “Willow Weep For Me” and a relatively breezy run through “What Can I Say Dear?,” but for the most part, Groovy is a decidedly fiery affair, evoking all the excitement of a swinging big band with just three exceptional players. While Garland’s hard bop quintet work of the same era (recorded with John Coltrane and Donald Byrd continued in the same vein, but with (obviously) a much brassier approach, the way he and this small group present such full-bodied liveliness has made Groovy a staple of the genre. This new OJC remaster breathes vibrant life into the original tapes, giving listeners the same sense of warmth and energy that the sessions generated.
